Civ IV Complete Edition was $10 on Steam just recently, a real steal. You can install on as many computers as you like and re-download whenever you want. Both Mac and Win versions included in the same price.
Gee, thanks for "allowing" this, you're all too kind. Of course the Nokia N900 has had Skype over WiFi and 3G since last fall, and with the latest update does Skype-to-Skype video calls as wells (over whatever TCP/IP connection you have of course, including 3G)! But I'm sure it will be a great innovation and a lot of fuss about it when the iPhone 4G or whatever invents video calls later on.
It seems the mouse wheel scrolling has been changed in 3.6. It's moving a much larger distance with each "click" of the wheel than before and if you scroll continuously it seems to accelerate even faster. My first impression is that I don't like it at all. It feels a lot more like Chrome, which isn't a good thing in my opinion, the annoying jumpy scrolling is one of the primary reasons I prefer not to use Chrome.
ARM7 is a family of cores. ARMv7 on the other hand is the latest ARM architecture version. The Cortex A8 and A9 are ARMv7 cores.
For example the Nokia N810 has a core from the ARM11 family, specifically ARM1136J. It is based on the ARMv6 architecture. The next Nokia device has been announced to be based on Texas Instrument's OMAP3 platform, which includes the new Cortex A8 (same as Pandora and Beagleboard).
Note that the N810 screen is exactly the same size as the one on the N800 (4.1", 225 DPI), if you're worrying about the readability. The screen is also transflective unlike the N800, which means it's easier to reader in direct sunlight.
Only the width of the casing has been reduced by moving the speakers to the sides of the device and the navigational pad down to the slide-out panel. In my opinion the change is definitely for the better.
But that's the beauty of it, you can! I throw my phone in my backpack, the 770 transparently connects through the phone to the GPRS network (no fiddling with the phone required) and I'm able to browse the net anywhere I have basic cell reception. A few weeks ago I was browsing Slashdot in the middle of a forrest, it was a real "holy shit, the future is here" moment.
Also the battery is much better than 3 hours, the 3 hours stated is full out use with the wifi and screen active 100% of the time. In actual use you get much better mileage. You can also leave the device on for days and it will instantly pick up from where you left.
The 770 can be put into USB host mode with the supplied linux flasher utility. However, the USB port is not powered, so your device must be self powered or you need a hub to supply power to the device. If you do manage to connect an USB keyboard, it will work for input.
It's a modified Debian system. Third party applications are delivered in DEB packages, some of which you can already find here.
It's not a crippled version of Linux either, it runs a full X server, comes with the GTK, DBus, GStreamer, SDL, almost everything you need to develop comfortably for the device. This makes porting applications really easy, you can concentrate on optimizing for the small form factor instead of fighting with the framework.
Of course the source is available. There are also tools available for creating your own filesystem images you can simply flash onto the device. By starting out with the minimal developers rootfs available you can install your custom applications, package it all into a image and flash any number of devices. The developer possibilites are endless; disable the default GUI in the startup scripts and run your own point of sales system interface, bundle the device with a BT GPS receiver and your own softare, run Apache (I have tried this:) in your pocket!
By contrast, the PSP has your hands well placed next to all the relevant buttons, joypad, etc. It's actually quite easy to use, especially because the buttons move you directly to the next hyperlink available so you don't have to mess around with the analog movement if you don't want to. I've used similar setups on cell phones as well (except vertically) and the "jump to the next link" works quite well.
If you hold the 770 with both your hands it works exactly as you describe, the navigation buttons quickly move you between the hyperlinks using some super secret Opera algorithm I can't quite figure out.
However I find that the 770 is also perfectly usable when held only with the one hand. I fact I prefer to surf holding the device in my right hand and scrolling the web page with the thumb on the same hand. You can simply drag anywhere on the web page to scroll the page smoothly, another huge benefit of the touchscreen. In reality you seldom need to reach for the stylus while surfing as the link navigation works so well and you can often get away with poking the screen directly with your finger when needed.
The init, inittab etc. files in Slackware all come from the sysvinit-*.tgz package, the only init package Slackware ships these days. It really is vanilla SysV init if you examine the binary, same as you will find on Fedora or Debian or what you can download from upstream. It's usually even the latest available release whenever Slackware is released.
The default scripts and the directory layout just aren't in SysV style, hence the confusion.
Slackware's init system is absolutely SysV if you look under the hood (or even just at the slackware package name). It's just that it SysV stuck at r2, before the now-standard symlink structure was introduced.
Sometimes people like to call it BSD-"style", although it has very little to do with BSD except the lack of symlinks, which is usually the only thing its proponents can name as a "feature". Another common theme among people who prefers this style is usually a complete lack of understanding of how a modern SysV is managed (hint: it does not involve creating or removing symlinks yourself). The point of SysVr3+ system is how it integrates with the packaging system and how services can *easily* be modified in pre/un-install targets of packages without bothering the user. It is completely unacceptable in a system of any complexity such as a Linux distribution that a package would by itself modify some file shared among all services, which is what you need to do to achieve the same effect on Slackware.
I'm not saying Slackware's system is bad, it's good if you value a little *administrator* simplicity over a whole lot of end-user's simplicity. I, and apparently most Linux distributions these days, seem to value the later a lot more.
It's great to see that even after becoming a publicly traded company, Google hasn't lost their sense of humor. The Google Gulp is a far more elaborate joke than last years Google Moonbase page. Even the GMail front page has some funny stuff on it today (love the coffee stain on the drawing;)
What would be really funny is if some idiot analyst would pick up the story as a fact. Google even likes to unveil legitimate new features on April 1st adding to the humor. Last year it was GMail which fooled many, this year they're doubling the GMail capacity and starting a yearly storage upgrade plan, one-upping the competition once again.
The license doesn't forbid distribution, but the terms are such that no Linux distributor will agree to them. Look, this license has been picked apart by the legal departments at Red Hat and Debian, and others. The distributions are not now, nor in the future, distributing the JVM. That's all there is to it, you're not going to change Red Hat's mind. If GCJ and Classpath does not get the job done, look forward to OO.o being demoted across a whole lot of distributions.
The sections (i) and (iii) in particular are very problematic to Linux distributors. They will not give up their rights to patch the software, as it leaves them entirely at the mercy of Sun. A distributors job is all about taking software, patching and integrating it. That already kills it for Red Hat, but then (iii) states that you can't ship any replacements for the software. Where does that put GCJ and Classpath, which Red Hat has spent a ton of effort on. Can Python be considered a competing component? Mono with JKVM certainly could be. As if that wasn't enough, (vi) requires the distributor to idemnify Sun. No wonder almost no one redistributes the JVM. Do you seriously think Red Hat would open themselves up to such an attack, with the way Sun has openly declared their hostility towards RH several times. They don't need a JVM that bad, they'll drop OO.o altogether before they indemnify Sun.
One real world problem I see IronPython fixing is the availability (or lack thereof) of up to date bindings for the language. Since IronPython targets the CLR you do not need to write your Python specific bindings for GTK, gnome-libs, etc. anymore. Instead, any Mono language can use the Mono targeting GTK#, gconf#, atk# and so on. This doesn't just affect Python, all smaller languages like Ruby or Haskell, heck even Perl and PHP, could benefit from using a shared set of bindings. Even if they already all have their own versions of GTK, when you want to introduce a new library like gnome-vfs everyone has to go and write their own version of it, which is just wasteful.
Also, Novell throwing their weight behind GTK# gives me confidence that we'll still be receiving updated versions of it a few years from now, which is important when you're trying to sell your PHB on the idea to base your next project on the bindings.
Here's a quick "Hello world" program in IronPython and GTK#, tested with Mono 1.0. It certainly looks slick. Note the neat way of attaching the function callback to the button's clicked signal, when you're coming from the C version of GTK you really appreciate small things like that:
See Steven Giesler's works for some amazing stuff. Even these images are already a few years old and Steven is no doubt working on new stuff already. Check out the rest of his site as well.
The state of the CG scene can in general be observed at community sites like CGNetworks. Here's some of the better picks from the user galleries: - An untextered model, check out the feet. - A TV presenter. - An Asian girl, a bit too perfect but still very nice. - Sandra. - Pinhead, I really like this one.
I forgot to explain swappiness. This is a entry in proc,/proc/sys/vm/swappiness, that you can plug a numerical value between 0 and 100 into. The higher the number, the more eager Linux will be to swap out applications from RAM to disk. There's a lot of conflicting opinions on what values you should use. Kerneltrap had a good article on it recently.
Personally I use a value of around 20 or less for desktop machines. This keeps Mozilla being paged out after a short while, that really shouldn't be happening on modern hardware. Too bad you can't achieve the same effect in Windows 2000. Some people swear that a swappiness of 0 is ideal for their desktops, your mileage may vary. It's fun to play with in any case, any changes you make take effect instantaneously.
The "swap=2x RAM" thing is obsolete admin trivia that simply refuses the die. It comes from the days when physical RAM was mapped into swap to simplify the swapping algorithm. If you didn't have at least a 1:1 correspondence between RAM and swap performance would suffer immensly. Starting with Linux 2.4 and up this is simply no longer true, there is no benefit from using excessively large swap partitions. Same goes for Sun OS and the BSDs these days.
Instead, the swap needed depends on the sort of usage pattern your machine has. If it's a desktop with 1-3GB of RAM, a swap partition of 1GB is completely adequate. Want the machine to swap as little as possible and utilize all the RAM, so turn down swappiness a bit to avoid Mozilla/Firefox from being paged out when you leave for 15 minutes.
On a server you need a whole lot more swap, the more the better. Not because it's necessarily any faster, it might be slower in fact with a high swappiness setting the system decides you don't really need that 2GB DB in memory if it's been unused for a month. But when you do run out of memory in legitimate use, the shit will really hit the fan if there isn't enough swap to pick up the slack.
- They're using the new IIIMF input system for inputting text in several languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc..). It works similar to IME in W2K/XP, you've got a an applet on your panel (Gimlet) that let's you switch the input method easily. This replaces many conflicting and archaic X input systems.
- X.org instead of XFree86. Not really visible to the end user, but it feels to good to be free from XFree86.
- SELinux with full system policy for all packages. Still quite rough, I wouldn't recommend it for serious deployment anywhere, but interesting to play with. There's much more to supporting SELinux than just providing the software, almost every system of the distro is affected by the policy and must be modified and tested.
Slashdot Mirror
Ground source heat pumps are sometimes found in residential houses at least in Europe.
Civ IV Complete Edition was $10 on Steam just recently, a real steal. You can install on as many computers as you like and re-download whenever you want. Both Mac and Win versions included in the same price.
Gee, thanks for "allowing" this, you're all too kind. Of course the Nokia N900 has had Skype over WiFi and 3G since last fall, and with the latest update does Skype-to-Skype video calls as wells (over whatever TCP/IP connection you have of course, including 3G)! But I'm sure it will be a great innovation and a lot of fuss about it when the iPhone 4G or whatever invents video calls later on.
It seems the mouse wheel scrolling has been changed in 3.6. It's moving a much larger distance with each "click" of the wheel than before and if you scroll continuously it seems to accelerate even faster. My first impression is that I don't like it at all. It feels a lot more like Chrome, which isn't a good thing in my opinion, the annoying jumpy scrolling is one of the primary reasons I prefer not to use Chrome.
ARM7 != ARMv7.
ARM7 is a family of cores. ARMv7 on the other hand is the latest ARM architecture version. The Cortex A8 and A9 are ARMv7 cores.
For example the Nokia N810 has a core from the ARM11 family, specifically ARM1136J. It is based on the ARMv6 architecture. The next Nokia device has been announced to be based on Texas Instrument's OMAP3 platform, which includes the new Cortex A8 (same as Pandora and Beagleboard).
Nokia's N810, which is an ARM device, comes with Flash 9. Not some stripped down mobile version either, but the full thing.
Only the width of the casing has been reduced by moving the speakers to the sides of the device and the navigational pad down to the slide-out panel. In my opinion the change is definitely for the better.
For the people that have one already, can the display be rotated for left-handed people?
Unfortunately not, but I know it's being considered.
Also, is the kernel source available? All I can find on the maemo site is a root image.
Here you go. All the packages are also available separately from the root image, with source.
And its not like you can just use it anywhere.
But that's the beauty of it, you can! I throw my phone in my backpack, the 770 transparently connects through the phone to the GPRS network (no fiddling with the phone required) and I'm able to browse the net anywhere I have basic cell reception. A few weeks ago I was browsing Slashdot in the middle of a forrest, it was a real "holy shit, the future is here" moment.
Also the battery is much better than 3 hours, the 3 hours stated is full out use with the wifi and screen active 100% of the time. In actual use you get much better mileage. You can also leave the device on for days and it will instantly pick up from where you left.
The 770 can be put into USB host mode with the supplied linux flasher utility. However, the USB port is not powered, so your device must be self powered or you need a hub to supply power to the device. If you do manage to connect an USB keyboard, it will work for input.
It's a modified Debian system. Third party applications are delivered in DEB packages, some of which you can already find here.
:) in your pocket!
It's not a crippled version of Linux either, it runs a full X server, comes with the GTK, DBus, GStreamer, SDL, almost everything you need to develop comfortably for the device. This makes porting applications really easy, you can concentrate on optimizing for the small form factor instead of fighting with the framework.
Of course the source is available. There are also tools available for creating your own filesystem images you can simply flash onto the device. By starting out with the minimal developers rootfs available you can install your custom applications, package it all into a image and flash any number of devices. The developer possibilites are endless; disable the default GUI in the startup scripts and run your own point of sales system interface, bundle the device with a BT GPS receiver and your own softare, run Apache (I have tried this
By contrast, the PSP has your hands well placed next to all the relevant buttons, joypad, etc. It's actually quite easy to use, especially because the buttons move you directly to the next hyperlink available so you don't have to mess around with the analog movement if you don't want to. I've used similar setups on cell phones as well (except vertically) and the "jump to the next link" works quite well.
If you hold the 770 with both your hands it works exactly as you describe, the navigation buttons quickly move you between the hyperlinks using some super secret Opera algorithm I can't quite figure out.
However I find that the 770 is also perfectly usable when held only with the one hand. I fact I prefer to surf holding the device in my right hand and scrolling the web page with the thumb on the same hand. You can simply drag anywhere on the web page to scroll the page smoothly, another huge benefit of the touchscreen. In reality you seldom need to reach for the stylus while surfing as the link navigation works so well and you can often get away with poking the screen directly with your finger when needed.
Here you go, an X terminal emulator for the Nokia 770.
The 770 ships with multiple desktop themes you can choose from, for example here's a shot of a blue one.
The init, inittab etc. files in Slackware all come from the sysvinit-*.tgz package, the only init package Slackware ships these days. It really is vanilla SysV init if you examine the binary, same as you will find on Fedora or Debian or what you can download from upstream. It's usually even the latest available release whenever Slackware is released.
The default scripts and the directory layout just aren't in SysV style, hence the confusion.
Slackware's init system is absolutely SysV if you look under the hood (or even just at the slackware package name). It's just that it SysV stuck at r2, before the now-standard symlink structure was introduced.
Sometimes people like to call it BSD-"style", although it has very little to do with BSD except the lack of symlinks, which is usually the only thing its proponents can name as a "feature". Another common theme among people who prefers this style is usually a complete lack of understanding of how a modern SysV is managed (hint: it does not involve creating or removing symlinks yourself). The point of SysVr3+ system is how it integrates with the packaging system and how services can *easily* be modified in pre/un-install targets of packages without bothering the user. It is completely unacceptable in a system of any complexity such as a Linux distribution that a package would by itself modify some file shared among all services, which is what you need to do to achieve the same effect on Slackware.
I'm not saying Slackware's system is bad, it's good if you value a little *administrator* simplicity over a whole lot of end-user's simplicity. I, and apparently most Linux distributions these days, seem to value the later a lot more.
Works for me.
It's great to see that even after becoming a publicly traded company, Google hasn't lost their sense of humor. The Google Gulp is a far more elaborate joke than last years Google Moonbase page. Even the GMail front page has some funny stuff on it today (love the coffee stain on the drawing ;)
What would be really funny is if some idiot analyst would pick up the story as a fact. Google even likes to unveil legitimate new features on April 1st adding to the humor. Last year it was GMail which fooled many, this year they're doubling the GMail capacity and starting a yearly storage upgrade plan, one-upping the competition once again.
The license doesn't forbid distribution, but the terms are such that no Linux distributor will agree to them. Look, this license has been picked apart by the legal departments at Red Hat and Debian, and others. The distributions are not now, nor in the future, distributing the JVM. That's all there is to it, you're not going to change Red Hat's mind. If GCJ and Classpath does not get the job done, look forward to OO.o being demoted across a whole lot of distributions.
The sections (i) and (iii) in particular are very problematic to Linux distributors. They will not give up their rights to patch the software, as it leaves them entirely at the mercy of Sun. A distributors job is all about taking software, patching and integrating it. That already kills it for Red Hat, but then (iii) states that you can't ship any replacements for the software. Where does that put GCJ and Classpath, which Red Hat has spent a ton of effort on. Can Python be considered a competing component? Mono with JKVM certainly could be. As if that wasn't enough, (vi) requires the distributor to idemnify Sun. No wonder almost no one redistributes the JVM. Do you seriously think Red Hat would open themselves up to such an attack, with the way Sun has openly declared their hostility towards RH several times. They don't need a JVM that bad, they'll drop OO.o altogether before they indemnify Sun.
Also, Novell throwing their weight behind GTK# gives me confidence that we'll still be receiving updated versions of it a few years from now, which is important when you're trying to sell your PHB on the idea to base your next project on the bindings.
Here's a quick "Hello world" program in IronPython and GTK#, tested with Mono 1.0. It certainly looks slick. Note the neat way of attaching the function callback to the button's clicked signal, when you're coming from the C version of GTK you really appreciate small things like that:
See Steven Giesler's works for some amazing stuff. Even these images are already a few years old and Steven is no doubt working on new stuff already. Check out the rest of his site as well.
The state of the CG scene can in general be observed at community sites like CGNetworks. Here's some of the better picks from the user galleries:
- An untextered model, check out the feet.
- A TV presenter.
- An Asian girl, a bit too perfect but still very nice.
- Sandra.
- Pinhead, I really like this one.
I forgot to explain swappiness. This is a entry in proc, /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, that you can plug a numerical value between 0 and 100 into. The higher the number, the more eager Linux will be to swap out applications from RAM to disk. There's a lot of conflicting opinions on what values you should use. Kerneltrap had a good article on it recently.
Personally I use a value of around 20 or less for desktop machines. This keeps Mozilla being paged out after a short while, that really shouldn't be happening on modern hardware. Too bad you can't achieve the same effect in Windows 2000. Some people swear that a swappiness of 0 is ideal for their desktops, your mileage may vary. It's fun to play with in any case, any changes you make take effect instantaneously.
The "swap=2x RAM" thing is obsolete admin trivia that simply refuses the die. It comes from the days when physical RAM was mapped into swap to simplify the swapping algorithm. If you didn't have at least a 1:1 correspondence between RAM and swap performance would suffer immensly. Starting with Linux 2.4 and up this is simply no longer true, there is no benefit from using excessively large swap partitions. Same goes for Sun OS and the BSDs these days.
Instead, the swap needed depends on the sort of usage pattern your machine has. If it's a desktop with 1-3GB of RAM, a swap partition of 1GB is completely adequate. Want the machine to swap as little as possible and utilize all the RAM, so turn down swappiness a bit to avoid Mozilla/Firefox from being paged out when you leave for 15 minutes.
On a server you need a whole lot more swap, the more the better. Not because it's necessarily any faster, it might be slower in fact with a high swappiness setting the system decides you don't really need that 2GB DB in memory if it's been unused for a month. But when you do run out of memory in legitimate use, the shit will really hit the fan if there isn't enough swap to pick up the slack.
They're working on a Flash authoring tool called Flex that runs on Linux. The plan is to run it with Wine though, but I guess it's better than nothing. Now we just need Adobe to get with the program.
Some highlights of changes in Fedora Core 2:
- They're using the new IIIMF input system for inputting text in several languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc..). It works similar to IME in W2K/XP, you've got a an applet on your panel (Gimlet) that let's you switch the input method easily. This replaces many conflicting and archaic X input systems.
- X.org instead of XFree86. Not really visible to the end user, but it feels to good to be free from XFree86.
- SELinux with full system policy for all packages. Still quite rough, I wouldn't recommend it for serious deployment anywhere, but interesting to play with. There's much more to supporting SELinux than just providing the software, almost every system of the distro is affected by the policy and must be modified and tested.